Hugh Halter

“The son of man has no place to lay his head” Jesus

A few nights ago, one of our young staff guys was processing both the fear and the adventure of looking for God to lead him through the nebulous calling of our team.   Even though Adullam is doing well as a church plant, our vision has pushed us to live by faith instead of banking on the church to pay our bills.  Because we’re experimenting around apostolic movement, we push each other to reach beyond maintenance and into a long-term posture of “sending out.”  To some it may sound wild and inspirational, but the reality means that we don’t have the foggiest idea of how we’re all going to make it.  It’s like hooking your carabineer to the side rail of one of those riverboats….you know, the kind that jet up a narrow, raging rapid at 60 MPH.

I shared how my wife Cheryl has had to grow some muscles of faith because we’ve never in 16 years of marriage, known how we were going to pay the bills month to month.  I also expressed how hard it is at times to be able to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, even to people I thought should get it.  And yes, even though there were incredible times of intimate calling and direction, there have been many nights I wake up in a sweat wondering if I’ve heard God correctly?

Unlike  a normal church experience, that has some security and clear boxes of roles, expectation, and job descriptions, Adullam doesn’t offer these things.  Everything feels like we’re learning it for the first time.  We can’t seem to find too many that have been where we feel God is calling us.  They don’t do national seminars or offer seminary classes on “how to effectively navigate a movement of incarnational communities and still pay your bills.” We do a lot of 360’s, there’s a lot of water hitting us in the face (fun as well as uncomfortable) and we often skim along barely missing huge rock outcroppings.

As the leader of this fun fleet, I do find myself discouraging people from being with us.  Pastorally, and as a friend, I don’t want anyone to go through what we have.  I waffle emotionally between wanting to prophetically call out a new Elijah type leader, the ones that wake up in the morning, snort at the devil, flip off fear, lace up their steel toed battle boots and head into action OR suggesting that people go do something a bit easier and more safe for their family.

As I prayed for this young man last night, the words of Jesus came quickly.  “The son of man has no place to lay his head.”  I don’t think these words are for everyone, or every Christian for that matter.  I suppose some would argue, but I’ve found that the call to apostolic, missionary life, although offered to many, is accepted by few, especially in a western context.

This man who Jesus responded to was asking to follow Jesus.  Jesus wasn’t heading into a nice life in the burbs.  He wasn’t looking for a youth pastor to help him start a cool church.  He wasn’t trying to gather a team of buddies that could serve with him for the next 50 years. He knew he was on a short time schedule, that the next day would be tough, and that the journey would be brutal.  Thus, he was honest, “Look pal, thanks for your interest, but if you come with me today, you’re going to have to leave your big-girl undies at home and wake up every morning picking dirt out of your ear.  You’ll be cold, misunderstood, maligned and malnourished. It won’t fit what your family back home considers a responsible way to live, and half the time you’ll think your nuts.

Jesus was setting an apostolic movement afloat and thus he could only take those who were called to the same life.

I’m not sure how this all will work out. We do have a church and I’m sure some day we’ll hire some people who can stay put and have a more stable existence.  But I realized last night, that we’re still in an apostolic posture and it will be hard for people to make it with us.  Young men and woman will have to be bi-vocational, work long hours, become comfortable with making their own schedule and writing their own job description. They’ll have to raise support, ask for money some days, and grab a hammer and work on other days.  Likewise, as said “leader” of this operation, I’ll have to do all I can to protect and provide for these courageous teammates. I’ll have to look beyond my own provision. I’ll have to share resources I raise.  I’ll have to limit the comfort I could justify for the sake of the team.  I’ll have to prioritize looking after the emotional and spiritual health of these risk takers-their spouses and their kids.

Today, I just pray.  “God of all mission,  God of all people, God of substance and calling, provision and peace.  Speak and lead us as you’ve done in days of old.  As you have given vision and courage to countless saints, revive the faith of our new leaders today. Provide enough and often enough so that we know you’re with us.  Silence the whispers of both demons and saints who don’t hear the same distant drum beat we hear.  We bank our lives on your simple words that “you will never leave us or forsake us.” Amen.

I’m sharing a post I uploaded to a group of courageous men who are in this years MCAP class with us.  They are church planters who we apprentice over 7 months. They aren’t normal.  They’ve decided to plant churches as a missionary would anywhere else in the world.  They don’t “launch” insta-churches in some nice new suburb.  Instead they commit to live amongst people, give their lives away relationally, until someone finds their life interesting. Then they do that over an over until a church begins to peek through.  They don’t have much funding because most denominations don’t want to wait for this type of incarnational fruit.  They’re family and friends don’t get it, often belittle them, and their mother church or denomination often marginalize their stories.

This week, we asked them to answer a simple question.  “How do you want to be remembered?”  I decided to throw in with them and I’ll share my response with you.

Some of you may know a dude named Deiter Zander. He has been a close friend and is most known for the church he started in SO Cal and then a stint at willow creek as the Axis leader. He wrote some early works on Gen X stuff. He had a stroke about three weeks ago and has been hanging on by a thread the whole time. I’ve been checking in on him every morning and it’s served as a daily reminder for me, to not just go through the motions.  A few days ago, I was listening to a talk show while driving, and they said that in the last 100 years, the average life expectancy has doubled from 40 to 80 years of age. Amazing, just 100 years ago, I’d be planning my final contribution. I’d be analyzing who I was going to give leadership to, who would get my pocket knife, and how I would want to be remembered. Now, as a 41 year old, I’d be encouraged to build myself a nice big church so that I could float into my 70’s and then retire as “pastor at large.”
If you know me, I just can’t go there, but I’m no different than anyone else. I still feel pressure to put away, plan ahead, and play it safe. Deiter’s fight for life has re-ignited a holy anger in me about my calling as a catalyst for missional fervor and incarnational communities. It’s forcing me to work my way out of my job sooner, to give more away to the great young men and women in the Adullam network, and to risk more. I’ve even started to attempt to raise more missionary support so I can hopefully give the small stipend I get from Adullam back to some of our younger staff. God willing, I can move into “grampa mode” and work the rest of my days preparing leaders to take this crazy call of the church forward.

I lament where the church is at right now.  I feel great pain listening to pastor after pastor who have lost their way, their vision, and their courage.  Most often because it’s been stripped from them by a consumer culture and consumer congregation that doesn’t let them lead like they want to or know they should.  At the end of the day, however, the only answer is that Men be Men!  Sure, we can blame our culture and our parishioners, but we are to blame. We’re the one’s God has called out from the normal strain of humans to model a new story and to hold to it, as if our shrinking back could lead hundreds and thousands away from our King.  If leaders don’t lead, followers will continue to live limp-wristed, milk-toast Christian stories in plain view of a savvy culture that is looking for something big to re-orient their lives around.  In every era of church transition, someone has to take the bullet so others can reach the target.  Many missional leaders will perish in this new landscape, but I see it as no different than the self-preserving pastors who have already died to their calling and core convictions.  We’re all going down, so why not go down big?

“The kingdom of Heaven is taken by force…and forceful men grab it by the..”
My paraphrase of Jesus’ words to his boys in Matthew 11:12.

Over and out.

This last week, I led a workshop at a national organic church conference. Most of the leaders had been, or were committed to house church forms. The increasing disinterest away from traditional or contemporary ways of church has given thousands of US leaders enough curiosity to look for alternative ways to worship, do church, and engage the world. As Missio has been focusing on incarnational ways of church, we’ve seen an increasing number of people ask us, “what do you think about this trend toward house church or simple church?”

To be honest, we’ve reserved the right to make any judgments at this point. We hold our tongue for several reasons. One, if there’s ever a time to experiment, deconstruct, and reconstruct, it’s NOW! When you know your cruise liner is taking on water, it doesn’t make much sense to judge those who are strapping on their life preservers and hopping in the little dinghy’s! To those who blindly disregard this new direction, we would ask, “on what grounds does the attractional church have to judge any other form of church at this point in our history?” When we’re losing approximately 2% of our present churched population every year, and we’re not reclaiming much new conversion growth, I believe the responsibility to prove or defend certain methods of ministry fall not on the experimenters or research and developers, but on the present forms to prove “why they should get to keep doing the same thing, if it’s not working.”

Yet, to those who blindly accept new forms as the next great thing…BEWARE. It’s not as easy or “simple” as they say, and it is causing as much tension in the lives of these leaders as we see in the lives of existing church pastors.

I chose to entitle our session, “Incarnational Community…what if it works.” I did so because of the over-optimistic stance many young and old leaders take when the shove off from the dock to sail these new “simple” seas.

To begin the session, I asked, “why did you come to this session?” There were a few moments of silence, and then one young man, said, “I left a normal church a few years ago because I just couldn’t take it anymore, but after three years of house church, it just doesn’t seem much better.” Once he chimed in, others shared the same pain.

Over the last five years, we’ve heard this same tension over and over. From house church, to simple church, to mega-church.

There are a lot of issues all webbed together that are causing this global tension, but let me highlight two important observations were making.

First, IT AIN’T ABOUT WHAT FORM OF CHURCH YOU DO! To try to reproduce mega-churches is as dumb a notion as trying to reproduce house churches. Why? Because people outside of our churchdom aren’t looking a for ANY type of church. The systemic issue of why something works or not (working = people coming to faith and re-orienting their lives around the mission of god) is about how God’s people embed themselves into the muck of the world to influence hearts towards God’s alternative kingdom. That’s it! House church people can be as exclusive and non-missional and non-incarnational as any other form of church.   Add to that the painful fact that many of these leaders have now given up their salary and now have to work 50 hours a week at home depot and then try to be incarnational. It’s just not that simple.

Secondly, “It” working has almost nothing to do with gathering people together in corporate times together.

It was interesting that even in this organic church conference, they invited a worship team to lead the 250 people in corporate worship. Yep, the reality is that believers love to worship and be together as long as they’re committed to a cause together. Some said, “It seems to go against the values of house church people to have corporate worship.” But why? Does having a gathering of Christians relegate those people to living non-missionally? Sure, it can, if it’s communicated that it’s the main thing. But what if corporate gatherings aren’t the main thing? What if corporate gatherings are so people can gather? That doesn’t seem so bad does it? We don’t think so.

Again, it’s not about how you gather or when you gather, or what you do when you gather. It’s about who’s in the room when you gather and how they found their way to the gathering. Believe me, if they find you through a website, door-hanger or because you offer free donuts, then you’re probably missing it. But if they have stumbled and bumbled their way in through the long term relational networks of community and benevolent action they experience through your people on their street, then it will not only be okay to gather them, but beneficial to the entire mission.

I pray that house church takes off as a legitimate form of mission, and I hope the leaders of these movements allow for as much flexibility and creativity as they deserve.  But I also hope they don’t fixate on the form of gathering at the expense of mission.   I hope mega-churches can find ways to be more incarnational. I hope millions will gather someday on Sundays, Monday, and whatever days make sense to them. But I pray that we as leaders finally realize that church working has nothing to do with “church” but how the people of God live an alternative story on main street usa.

Hughdog out

Today we had our normal Wednesday staff meeting.   Normal, only in that we meet every week and so it feels like we have some consistency.  That’s about all that’s normal.  We’ve been sniffing for clues from God about how we should lead the Adullam network, but up until a few months ago, it was only Matt and myself.  We’d meet every day, grab a cup of coffee and stare at each other.  Eventually one of us would grunt out,” So what do we have to do today?”  We’d then piece together some “strategic plan” about churches we needed to work with, sojourners we needed to spend time with, Christians we needed to renovate, and then cover any schedule issues related to parties, gatherings, or our weekly community time.  In a sick, beautiful sort of way, we’d try to encourage each other that we were on to something.

Emotional reality, however, was that we didn’t really know what the heck we were doing.  We didn’t have any people we could call. Most pastor buddies we knew probably thought we were nuts, and we didn’t have much more than our gut intuition and Alan Hirsch’s friendship and book to make us feel like we were getting somewhere.

Somewhere along the line, our incarnational communities began to pick up speed, our gatherings started to make sense, and it just seemed like it (still not sure what “it” was) was working.  Defragged and jaded Christians loved our experience, really great young leaders put their eggs in our basket, and we realized God was giving us continual favor with spiritually lost folks.

We would host some occasional conference and even other pastors and church planters thought we knew exactly what we were doing. Many times however, Matt and I would drive home from an event and giggle over how God showed up and saved our bacon.

Now we’re blessed to have 9 leaders with us.    Their average age is about 25 and their average ministry experience is about three years.  I suppose they look to us as the experts (after all, we have a book coming out in April), but now that they’re spending time with us every week, I think they’re starting to realize that we really don’t have it all figured out.

Today was a great day.  We sat around and re-architected some major structural pieces to the Adullam network. Some of it was around our villages, some was around spiritual formation and shepherding issues.  We fought a little, helped each other get to greater clarity, and at the end of two hours I felt like God just saved our collective butts again…mostly at the emerging leadership of our rookies.

In Acts we see a few times where Paul acknowledges that the Holy Spirit redirected their schedule and strategy.  Jesus even seemed to expose that day by day He wasn’t pre-planning his day until he heard from His Father.

Look, I’m not one of those guys that thinks you can just plant or lead a church by cosmic osmosis like a hippy in the 60’s would lead his 6 buddies down the highway in their VW van.  I still believe deeply in living intentionally and in providing structures and processes to help move people into mission.  Yet, there remains this strange balance where I have to admit that all the cool stuff happening with Missio and Adullam over the last five years is not because we pre-planned it.  Crap, most of it hit us in the side of face like a slap from your grandma!

Hanging with young leaders and sojourners, re-orienting Christians back to mission, throwing parties, living incarnationally, blah, blah…Yes, we planned that.  All the rest has been like waking up weekly to find a new piece of cheese on the path.

Is it possible to be both Spirit-Led and intentional? Yep.

The Post-everything world provides some unique opportunities for us, but I fear only the most intuitive and flexible leaders will be able to navigate the unique intangibles of fruitful mission.  The leaders we train who are too rigid don’t make it.  The leaders who de-construct too much don’t make it.  The ones who don’t want to plan or who don’t believe in leadership don’t make it.

Hard working, quick to listen/slow to speak, team-oriented, leaders who take the responsibility to dive into the culture and take the responsibility to keep leading seem to make it.

Look for the cheese. (Gouda is my favorite)

Today, I attempted my first “Hot Yoga” class. If you’re unfamiliar with hot yoga, it’s a cross between a medieval form of torture and sun bathing on the northshore of Hell. It’s 90 minutes of high impact, muscle ripping poses in a 105 degree room. I told the instructor that this was my first time, and she smiled but said I’d find inner peace as well as a good sweat. Suffice it to say, I got the latter without the inner peace.

Now I’m no dummy, I realize that Yoga is derived from ancient eastern faiths (like Christianity) but most if it assumes a Hindu background. Both faiths teach that one can find peace within and that divinity can be attained through much effort, focus, and self-denial. Yoga is just one way that a person can begin to integrate this process.

As I talked with the instructor afterwards, it became obvious that she was passionate about the inner spiritual disciplines and that she loved to teach these principles, and was quite confident that everyone should agree with her interpretation of the universe and the forces that operate.

Obviously, my Christian faith would agree with many principles such as (the benefit of meditation, the integration of mind, soul, and spirit, and the emptying of self.) Yet, we would probably disconnect at the level of two primary issues. One, who runs the universe? And two, the source of the power to truly change the spirit of a person. In Hindu tradition, it’s the man or the woman that has the power. In Christianity, it’s Jesus only who has the power to transform a person.

I really enjoyed this woman and hope to get to know her much more and to learn from her. But as we’ll talk this Sunday, Jesus begins the transformation process by asking us to be “poor in spirit.” This means to be empty spiritually, not confident, proud, or knowledgeable. It means that we don’t come to Him (True Spirit) with our own ideas, but that we come as a child to learn everything anew and let him, by His spirit (not ours) reform our mind, body, soul, spirit, world-view, focus of living, EVERYTHING!